I found these old cards at a thrift store a few years back, and sent out the very last of them this year. Inside it says “I hope yule log on for the holidays,” which is just delightfully corny. In the ’90s I would have found it gauche, but with 30 years of hindsight it charms me.
I’m fond of Christmas, and if you are as well, then I hope you’re having a very merry morning today! And for everyone else, I hope you’re also having a merry morning for reasons entirely separate from the holiday.
As is tradition on this day, I’ve crafted a song for you to cringe at! This year I’ve taken the melody of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and replaced the lyrics with a little story from the perspective of a hireling. One that I think reflects a common experience for these ill-fated NPCs in many OSR games. Sadly, neither my singing voice nor my dance moves have improved at all over the years. (Perhaps one day of practice each year is not enough?) I’m pretty happy with these lyrics, though. Fr fr. No cap. ^_^
This year I’ve also discovered that’s it’s fairly affordable to license background music when you’re using public domain melodies on small personal projects. My respect to Ben Dransfield of bdProductions for performing the music and making it available royalty free for just a few bucks.
Hark! I Am a Hireling — Lyrics
Mom don’t fret about a thing, I am now a hireling. Holding torches, hauling loot, no doubt gen’rous tips to boot. Orcs looking at us cock-eyed. “Where should noncombatants hide?” Dagger shoved into my hand: “Fight or Die” is the command.
Mom don’t fret about a thing, I am now a hireling.
Dungeon law is sink or swim. Fate for those who fail is grim. “What contract?” the boss man asks, “want to find your own way back?” Traps rend comrades to my right, on our left the skel’tons fight. Treasure found: from gold is wrought; wage in copper been forgot.
Mom pray for my homecoming, life’s bad for a hireling.
Pressing onward caution thrown, gold lust in the bosses’ bones. Spy a flagstone raised slightly. Press my lips shut tightly. Lancing fire and scything blade! Boss-man skewered and sauteed! With his helm atop my head, no more will we be misled.
Mom I bring wealth fit for kings, I’m no more a hireling.
The Original Dungeons & Dragons published in the Three Little Brown Books is a delightful and frustrating game. It’s good simple fun, with some real virtues that had already been diluted or lost by the time of Holmes, Moldvay, and the Advanced edition of the game. OD&D was my introduction to the OSR, through Brendan’s Pahvelorn campaign, and I’ve retained an abiding love for it. But it’s clunky, inconsistently written, requires the players to reference entirely different games for combat and wilderness travel rules. It has desperately needed an update since the day it was published, and the only problem is that every heretofore existing update has made OD&D worse in some way.
My friend Marcia, of Traverse Fantasy, has spent over a year studying OD&D. She’s been working to unpack its mysteries for nearly as long as I’ve known her. Applying her mathematical skills to teasing out all the hidden implications of its mechanics. She has weighed each oddity to identify whether it’s suggestive of interesting worldbuilding, or if it’s simply a mistake. She has collected the external material from Chainmail and Outdoor Survival and performed the same rigorous examination there. She’s worked to clarify the game from top to bottom.
And because she’s dedicated to engaging with this hobby as a hobby, she doesn’t even want any of your money for it. This invaluable work of love and sweat is yours to play for free.
It’s happening right now!26 episodes! 8 hours of RPG thoughts, theories, and flavor for your listening enjoyment!
Back up, what is this about?
Blogs on Tape is a podcast with a very simple purpose: we find good blog posts from the OSR and adjacent RPG scenes, and we perform readings of them. Each episode is just one post. Our aim is to make the scene easier for people to dip their toe into. Listen to D&D blogs on your commute, or while you do the dishes, or while you exercise.
When do new episodes come out?
Every weekday (Monday-Friday) a new episode will drop at 8AM (PST). This will continue until all Season 5 episodes have aired. (Last episode will be on November 24th). After that, Blogs on Tape will go back into hibernation until some point in 2023.
Where can I find these episodes?
The Blogs on Tape website is where they will first appear. After that, sandestins carry the episodes off to add them to Apple Podcasts, Podbay, and Spotify. (Though, as anyone who deals with sandestins can tell you, these creatures are sometimes lazy and may not do their job as quickly as you’d like.)
I’ve also got a thread on twitter that I’m updating each morning as new episodes get added. If you’re on twitter, that thread is worth following.
How can I help?
A Ko-Fi donation to help pay our hosting costs would be a big help. As Blogs on Tape grows (134 episodes at the end of this season! A total of 26 hours of audio!) hosting fees may become a greater concern. Getting some or all of it covered by community support would be a load off.
Aside from that, I really appreciate suggestions for which blog posts are worth reading. I also accept recordings from guest readers. In either event please contact me directly at my business email address.
Lastly, you can do all the same sorts of algorithm-feeding stuff that helps any creative project: retweet that thread I linked above. Post about episodes you enjoyed on your social media of choice. Tell a friend. Rate and review the podcast on Apple/Podbay/Spotify.
Honestly though, you don’t owe me anything. I do this because I care about this scene and enjoy feeling like I’m contributing to it. More than anything I’m just happy to have found a project that folks enjoy.
The current incarnation of On a Red World Alone has been an experiment with a novel procedure of play. The primary aim is to compress the traditional adventurer-to-conqueror campaign structure, so domain play can occur from the first session without ever displacing adventure play.
For those unfamiliar with the (so-called) traditional structure, it is typically presented thus: characters begin as grubby dungeon delvers scrabbling in filth to survive. Through the accumulation of levels, power, wealth, and influence, they become monarchs (or warlords, kingpins, archmages, & popes). In addition to delving dungeons or exploring wilderness, players at this exalted level will engage in ‘domain play.’ How domain play is done has always been vague. Presumably it involves managing large numbers of people and resources rather than only a single character and their personal resources. The idea is compelling, but I’ve never been certain how to approach it. Given how infrequently domain play is discussed, and how incomplete those discussions are, I suspect I am not alone. This post describes my attempt to solve that problem.
Two notes before we dive in:
This post will necessarily get deep into the nitty gritty of my game’s setting. I worry that the quirks of the setting may be more distracting in this post than they normally are, so here’s a quick primer for those not familiar with On a Red World Alone. ORWA is set in a densely packed city inside a biodome on Mars. The earth was obliterated shortly after this colony was established, before it had achieved self-sufficiency. The scant few survivors of the human species, traumatized by loss and the struggle for survival, descended into barbarism for centuries. The game is set 500 years after the destruction of Earth. It is the dawning of a new period of enlightenment. Within living memory (Session 1) the Dome was culturally and technologically medieval, but over the past 12 years (176 Sessions) a great deal of cultural progress has been made, and lost knowledge rediscovered.
What I describe below remains experimental. Every week I discover new ways to improve on it: develop new tools, discard vestigial mechanics, make key refinements to phrasing. Even the act of articulating my current procedures in this essay has highlighted areas which needed adjustment, so that in places this is now a step ahead of anything my players have seen.
Procedure Outline
Each time we gather to play On a Red World Alone, we start with the Domain Phase. When that’s over we shift to the Adventure Phase until the end of the session.
Domain Phase
Determine Consequences
World Events
Update Progress Bars
Faction Actions
Player Actions
Adventure Phase
Choose a Mission
Preparation
Travel
Through the Dome
Through the Sewers
Into Space
Over the Surface of Mars
Exploration
Dungeon
Neighborhood
Return Home
Haven Turn
Post-Session
Write Recap
Review The Questions
Prepare for next session
Domain Phase
The Domain Phase represents one month of game time, and is played through in its entirety each session. With a fair degree of consistency, it takes between 40 and 60 minutes to get through the whole thing. I’m fairly strict about ending sessions 3 hours after start time, so the Domain Phase represents roughly one third of an evening of play.
1 — Determine Consequences
One player is called on to roll a consequence for this session. A riff off Arnold’s “Potential Drama” idea. I maintain a table of consequences that will result from the player’s actions, or from the baggage they rolled randomly during character creation. These can influence any part of the session, which is why I roll them first thing. Some consequences can only occur if a specific player is present, while others apply to the whole party. It’s rare to have a session with everyone in it, so before I announce which die the group needs to roll, I do some quick mental shuffling to figure out which entries on the table are possible today. Everything on the table is specific and prepared in advance. Examples might include:
(Only if The Wizard Player is present.) A consequence of the time the Wizard had a spell failure which created a contagious meme about how they smell bad. There’s a bad flare-up today. Everyone the party meets will React at -1 because they think the party are stinky.
A consequence of that time the party rescued an artist from a monster that collects artist hands. She has sent the party a gift! A painting that would make an excellent poster, and could serve as a huge boost to a propaganda campaign action. The art may be held in reserve until the party wishes to use it.
A consequence of that time the party broke into a mercenary’s apartment, robbed him and then killed him. His crew figured out who did it, and the first encounter that occurs during this session’s Adventure Phase will be an ambush.
2 — World Events
Another player is called on to roll a 2d6 on the table below. Like Consequences, each of these has specific results prepared in advance. I’ve actually got 3 prepped for each, though that’s a bit of excess on my part. Regardless of what is rolled, the prepared results are meant either to create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to. Whether the opportunity or crisis is better dealt with during the Domain or Adventure phase is often open to interpretation.
Natural Disaster (Example: The Dome’s water systems hit a serious snag. Low areas of the Dome are under 2d12 inches of water. This goes up by 2d12 each week until fixed. Every faction’s Food is reduced by 2 for every foot of water.)
Major Figure Exits Public Life (Usually deaths, but occasionally exile or imprisonment) (Example: Susan Quar, narcotics dealer of note and longtime supplier for all the party’s needs, has been killed. The party will need to make new arrangements.)
Opposed Faction Receives Unexpected Boon (Example: A randomly determined enemy faction discovers an abandoned missile silo in their territory. They keep this very hush-hush, but whispers of excited activity in the area reach the party’s ears. Check upcoming faction actions for that faction. Could any of them be enhanced with a missile?)
Wizard or Dragon Shit (Example: Madam Crucifixion attempted to ambush Dr. Guillotine. She knew just where to go. The battle was brutal. Both survived, and both retreated severely depleted in resources to places where they could hunker down. You could easily identify a few locations to raid while they’re laid up, though if they are able to divine who did it they’d certainly retaliate. Alternatively, you could attempt to destroy one of them in their weakened state. The two are probably the most powerful wizards still living in the Dome (excluding inscrutable Penelope).)
Sub-Faction Action (While the Dome’s major factions all regularly get opportunities to act, this result allows smaller groups to occasionally be at the center of Domewide issues.) (Example: Happy Worm Cultists scavenge food from the players faction. 1 Fewer food this Domain turn. They are well-liked by those who know them, so using force to stop them from eating in order to maintain your taxes would require a roll on the bad reputation table.)
One Additional Faction Action This Session (See Factions Actions below)
Public Need Arises in the Party’s Territory (Example: d4 of the party’s Weorods have been taking undue liberties. Stealing, getting drunk and violent, that sorta thing. Tensions are rising to the point that there are murmurings that large scale violence may break out.)
Public Discovery Made (Example: An archive of “I can haz cheezeburger” memes is discovered online, and spreads rapidly around the Dome. People are quoting it constantly, and it will briefly serve as a sort of universal language of friendliness, allowing the communication of basic ideas outside normal language bounds. After the next Haven Turn everyone will be sick of it and uttering them will probably be regarded as a hostile action.)
Party’s Alliances or Experts are Threatened (Example: The party’s chief engineer recently refused a strange offer to leave your employ and go work for someone else. Now she’s receiving extortionate texts demanding she leak secrets. She won’t reveal what she’s being extorted with, but if you don’t do something about it she’s going to have to give in to the extortion.)
Party’s Tools or Programs are Threatened (Example: Ace Reporter Willie Kypho (formerly of Cult Quarterly) drops the story that the party controls the majority of the Dome’s weather control systems. Why hasn’t this information been shared, or this resource been put to the public good? The party needs to make some response or roll on the bad reputation table.)
Factionogenesis (Example: Duck Folk seize 2d6 blocks of territory in a random location. Call it Duckburg.)
3 — Update Progress Bars
“Progress Bars” being my cheeky re-naming of Clocks. This somewhat tedious-yet-vital activity goes between two more interesting activities in the hopes the players don’t drift too far while I do a bit of bookkeeping. On occasion, clocks will reach a hiccup that I secretly scheduled when the clock was set. It still advances by 1 for this session, but won’t be able to progress any further until some issue is resolved. Thus, if the party are on the ball and get it resolved during this session, they won’t lose any time.
4 — Faction Actions
At present there are 10 major factions in ORWA, aside from the players’ own. Each has their own agenda, and a secret schedule of 3 prepared actions they will take in pursuit of it. When the session reaches this point I call on two players (or three, if a 7 was rolled for the World Event) to roll a d10 to determine which factions advance their agendas this month. Like the World Events these are meant to either create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to, though sometimes they’re just clues about something big that’s coming in the future that the party may wish to prepare for.
Some examples of recent Faction Actions in ORWA:
Pamphlets are distributed to the Akiovashan Faithful, who are set the task of scouring the Dome for a certain room. The pamphlet is very general and mostly pictorial. (Literacy isn’t widespread). For those in-the-know, they’re clearly looking for the Dome’s environmental control systems. Secretly, the party is in possession of several of these. Handing one or more over to the Akiovashans would be massively beneficial to your relationship with that faction. If you don’t want them to find it, you may want to take steps to hinder their search.
A large number of “former” soldiers of The Redstone Lords request safe passage through the party’s territory. They’re traveling to the Lords of Light territory to “learn the LoL’s advanced farming techniques, so they can use their strength to feed their people.” Your intelligence reports suggest the Redstone Lords’ disarmament is a ruse, but refusing passage outright would be a very bad move from a public relations perspective.
The Hell’s Tenants performed a major raid in Team Gopher’s territory. A hole opened up in the ground, and dozens of mangled horn-headed people emerged, dragging dozens more back down the hole with them. Pursuit was attempted, but failed. The tunnels are too labyrinthine. What are they doing with all of these captives?
5 — Player Actions
Finally, the group takes on the role of their faction’s leadership, with all its resources at their disposal. Between the World Events, the Faction Actions, and any hiccups in the party’s Progress Bars, there ought to be a number of fresh hooks for the party to respond to. I also maintain a list of open hooks left over from previous sessions in case additional prompts are needed, though my aim is that some space is left in most sessions for the group to seize the initiative for themselves.
The group is allowed to pursue a number of goals equal to the number of players present, with each player acting as caller in turn. They do not control any particular characters at this stage. Their own PCs are currently low-level grunts who aren’t important enough to be consulted on matters of policy.
I’ve adopted this unusual form because the mode of play is unfamiliar. There was a tendency early in the experiment for players to use the Domain Phase to support their characters in the Adventure Phase, whereas my goal is to encourage the exact opposite behavior. I want to foster a group who approaches the game as a domain-level problem, and wields their adventuring PCs as tools in pursuit of domain-level goals. Additionally, positioning each player as a caller has been helpful for supporting players who aren’t able to play consistently and don’t fully grok what’s going on. Each player can cede as much or as little control as they want to the rest of the group during their turn at caller.
The group’s faction has a character sheet listing its resources, and there are mechanics for 8 codified actions:
Recruit (Gain Human Resources, so long as the faction has enough food to support them.)
Diplomacy (Make requests of another faction. What is possible depends greatly on existing diplomatic relations.)
Propagandize (Attempt to influence public opinion.)
R&D (Set a team of experts to solving a complicated problem, or developing something new.)
Public Works (Set a team of workers to solve a simple problem, or build something standard.)
Establish Institution (Create an ongoing program, which will be an ongoing drain on resources)
Military (Direct the faction’s armies.)
Give Quest (Send spies, assassins, and adventurers to accomplish specific goals.)
The breadth of action allowed by “pursing a goal” is left intentionally vague at the moment. I’m searching for a balance between giving each player a satisfying turn at the helm, without allowing the scope of everyone’s turns to balloon into something unmanageable. Most of the time a single action is sufficient for pursuing a goal. There are cases, though, where one action leads directly into another so smoothly that it would be disruptive to cut off the turn. For example, there was a recent turn in which a player organized a counter-attack to reclaim some seized territory [Military], then used footage of the event to convince several other factions [Diplomacy] to join them in issuing a public condemnation of the original attack [Propaganda].
What I may do in the future is create a mechanic whereby the length of each action can be determined, then allow each player to serve as caller for one month’s worth of actions.
Adventure Phase
Unlike the Domain Phase, the Adventure Phase is not played in its entirety each session. On average it takes between two and four sessions to get all the way through the Adventure Phase’s procedure. The action pauses when it’s time for the session to end, then picks up where we left off once the Adventure Phase resumes in the next session. This means the Domain and Adventure Phases are usually a little out of sync with one another, existing on a floating timescale where one advances rigidly 1 month each session, and the other phase can spend half a dozen sessions getting through a single day. This may initially seem confusing, but the solution is simple: just don’t think about it. Strict time records must not be kept.
1 — Choose a Mission
When starting a fresh Adventure Phase, the group needs to decide what they’re going to do. They can personally address any of the issues raised during the Domain Phase, acting as a commando team or diplomatic delegation for their faction. Alternately, they can ignore the hooks and attempt to take the initiative on behalf of their domain, perhaps by raiding a faction they dislike, or doing a favor for one of their allies. They can also ignore domain level concerns entirely, and spend this Adventure Phase selfishly seeking personal wealth and power. Experience points in ORWA can only be earned by donating money into the faction’s coffers (1 donated credit card = 1 experience point / 1 level gained = 1 unit of funds usable in the Domain Phase), so even this purely selfish pursuit has the party acting in their faction’s interests.
Generally I will reiterate the most obvious hooks that are on the table here, and ask the party what they want to do. If there isn’t a clear consensus, I’ll randomly appoint one of the players as Party Leader, and ask them to set the goal. (I then note who has been party leader, and they won’t be in the running again unless everyone else present has been leader an equal number of times.)
2 — Preparation
Before setting out from the safety of the walled citadel of their faction, the party has an opportunity to alter their equipment loadout, recruit hirelings, make arrangements with allies, or pursue information. Because this is a setting in which cell phones are ubiquitous, the party can accomplish quite a bit by calling ahead to some friendly NPCs.
3 — Travel
Regardless of what goal the party is pursuing, part of that pursuit will involve travel. ORWA has four entirely different mechanics for handling this, though each share a single procedure:
The destination is set.
The referee determines how many hours (or days, or weeks) the journey will take, and how many encounter checks will result. (# of encounter checks is rounded up!)
The players are called upon one by one to roll a d6, with results determined according to which mode of travel they’re in.
The players resolve the encounter to their satisfaction.
If this mode of travel depends on resources, check to see if they ought to be depleted.
Return to c, and repeat the process from there until the party reaches their destination.
The various forms of travel available to the party are:
Over the surface of Mars. Encounters are rolled less frequently and occur less often in this sprawling red desert. There are locations to find and creatures to contend with, but the greatest danger is the environment. Within the Dome there’s food vendors on every other street, and a climate automatically controlled for human comfort. Outside, the characters must carry enough food to get wherever they’re going and back again, and be prepared for the extreme heat of the day and extreme cold of the night. Note that before traveling over the surface, the party would need to travel through the Dome to one of its exits.
Into Space. One of the party’s key resources is a fixed portal between their walled citadel inside the Dome, and a space station in geosynchronous orbit above the Dome. There’s a space ship docked at the station which the party can use to travel into space. The thing is a 500 year old freight hauling vessel which moves about as quickly as our own modern space ships do. It also runs on a form of solid fuel which the party currently has no means of acquiring more of, so resource management is critically important. Encounters are quite rare in space, though. It’s even more barren than the surface of mars.
Through the Sewers. A labyrinth accessible from manhole covers in the Dome’s streets. The sewers extend further down into the interior of Mars than any player has yet ventured. This is not a mapped space, but rather a Flux which connects both to mapped spaces and to other Fluxes. (Flux Space is another idea I must revisit soon!) I allow players to use the sewers to travel between any two points on the surface. It requires 1 encounter roll more than if they’d taken the direct path through the Dome’s streets, but by traveling in the sewers the players are able to avoid dense crowds of people and factional authorities. Sewer encounters are a couple notches weirder and more deadly than the ones typically faced on the surface.
Through the Dome. By far the most common mode of getting where the party needs to go, since the Dome is where people live and thus where most things happen. There’s no supply-based resource depletion to worry about when traveling through the Dome, since the party is presumably never far from a vendor that sells any basic material they might need. However the Dome is dense with encounters and impediments of every sort, which will tax the party’s less easily replenished resources, like their hit points and saving throws. Of course they can always find somewhere that’ll rent them a bed for a day or two, but such rest gives their goal time to become more complicated.
4 — Exploration
Depending on the player’s goals, the destination they’re traveling to is probably either a Dungeon, or a Neighborhood.
Dungeon Exploration
My dungeon exploration procedure is pretty standard.
The referee describes the party’s current environment.
The party, acting as a group, uses one Exploration Turn to investigate the space they’re in, or move to a different space. If one member announces their intent to take individual action (i.e., hacking a computer), I check in with everyone else in the group to see how their characters spend that same block of time.
The referee relays new information to the party, such as the results of their investigation, or the success/failure of their actions.
After a-c have cycled 3 times, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
Encounter surprises the party.
Party gets the drop on an encounter.
Impediment (i.e., a minor collapse occurs)
Local Effect (i.e., if the dungeon has a unique function, that function occurs.)
Clue. (Either for the next encounter, or to the location of some treasure, etc.)
The party resolves the results of the encounter roll, after which the procedure resets. Repeat until the party escapes the dungeon.
Neighborhood Exploration
Neighborhoods are not inherently hostile to being navigated the way dungeons are. By definition they are inhabited by large groups of people who have some reasonable expectation of moving around their neighborhood with relative safety. The party doesn’t need to worry about traps, doesn’t need maps, and can’t solve their problems with violence so easily. Rather, the challenge of adventuring in a neighborhood is social. Can you strike up a conversation with a shopkeep and convince her to tell you about the local tough’s watering hole? Can you impress the toughs enough that they’ll tell you where you can find the mercenary you’re after? (Credit to Ava of Errant & Permanent Cranial Damage for this idea!)
Neighborhoods ARE inherently hostile to outsiders, and so it’s important to determine whether or not the party will be clocked as outsiders. Do they speak the local dialect? Are their clothes within the range of fashions that are normal here? Are their hands as calloused, or as soft, as other folks? Each neighborhood has a few key features common to its residents. If most of the party shares these features, the neighborhood will yield to them. If most of the party looks like they don’t belong here, the neighborhood will resist them. (Credit to Ty of Mindstorm for this idea!)
My neighborhood procedure goes like this:
Does the majority of the party share the key features of this community?
Where do they want to begin their inquiry?
Going to a local official opens the party to greater scrutiny, but could provide them with greater resources.
Merchants are always willing to talk with outsiders, but you’ve got to spend money to get their attention.
Bar patrons are often open to striking up a conversation with someone who buys them a drink.
Random people on the street are always an option, but most folk don’t love being approached by randos.
After the conversation is resolved, where does the party go next? (Did they learn something they can act on, or do they need to continue searching for their first clue?)
As they travel to their next neighborhood location, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
Party Obviously Outsiders
Encounter Roll
Party Blends In
Locals watch you face danger.
1. Encounter Unusual Danger
People try to help you.
Party shaken down or threatened.
2. Encounter a Local Tough
The toughs nod, and pass by.
Your plight is ignored.
3. Physical Impediment
People let you know how to bypass it.
4. Local Effect
5. Clue
Your own hirelings.
6. NPC Chatter
A helpful local appears.
The party arrives at their destination and may continue their inquiry in a new location. Repeat c, d, & e until the adventure is complete.
5 — Return Home
Ideally this should be handled with exactly the same travel procedure as before. Usually I enforce this. Occasionally, doing so would create an awkward break in the Adventure Phrase. One where the Session needs to end in 10 minutes, and the journey home will take 40 minutes. Too long to extend the session for, but an annoyingly short amount of play to resolve next session. When this happens I often handwave the travel home. I do very much prefer to play through it properly most of the time, though.
6 — Haven Turn
The length of a Haven Turn is “however long is necessary for the Adventure Phase to catch up with the Domain Phase on the calendar.” Most of the stuff I once used Haven Turns for has been subsumed into the Domain Phase, with the exception of character downtime. The procedure is fairly brisk:
Hit Points & Saving Throws return to their baseline values. Magic Users may swap their memorized spells. Characters who sacrificed their armor may replace it.
Players may donate as much of their money as they like into their faction’s coffers, gaining xp equal to that amount. (Characters with debt must pay equal amounts towards their debt)
Each player is asked in turn how their character spends the downtime. A non-exhaustive list of options:
Relaxation. The character starts next adventure with 1 Temporary Hit Point per level.
Research. The character does a deep dive, and may uncover the answers to 3 questions. (Some information may require them to have a specific source of knowledge to dive into.)
Relationship Development. Make a social roll to improve your relationship with a certain NPC.
Crafting. Describe an object you’d like to make, and make a skill check to build it.
Spell Creation. The player writes the first draft of the spell. The referee writes the final draft.
Solo Quest. The character pursues a personal goal which would perhaps be too much of a distraction for them to drag the rest of the party along for. The player sets one specific goal which must be approved by the referee, then rolls 2d6:
2. Failure, begin the next Adventure Phase with half HP and a Saving Throw of 15.
3-5. Failure, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13.
6-8. Success, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13
9-11. Success, begin next adventure with -1hp.
12. Success, no injuries, and you also brought home cash treasure worth 200cc per level!
Post Session
Before each session starts I make a copy of my session report template, which I fill out as we play. After the session (immediately if possible) I flesh out the details into a full session report. My goal with these is not to write compelling reading—I’ve never enjoyed reading session reports, and only started sharing mine by request. The purpose of my play reports is as reference material. It’s handy to be able to type in the name of an NPC and immediately see all their appearances in the game. Frequently I’m able to use it when one of the players can’t find their notes about how one of their magic items works. Just recently it was useful when I started keeping a list of open hooks for Domain Actions. That wasn’t something I had been tracking, but it was simple to look over all the hooks I’d given out and write down the ones that would still be open.
One great failing of my approach is that I over-write my session reports. They don’t need to be anywhere near as long and detailed as they are. This is a failing in my technique that I’ve never quite managed to fix, but I’m sure others could get the same benefits with less effort.
At the bottom of my recap template are a set of questions to consider. I use these to write out a list of everything I want to accomplish before the next session:
What needs to be restocked? (At a minimum, one of the world events and two of the Faction Actions. Usually there will be encounters that got used up as well.)
Does anyone need to be added to Recurring Characters? (Per my Encounter Table method. Were any NPCs fun enough that I want to see them again?)
Who did the characters wrong? (And more importantly: what are they going to do about it? Should they be added to the consequences table, or should a whole adventure be planned around their revenge?)
Does anyone owe the party a favor? (Similar to the above: what are they going to do about it?)
What Hooks should be added for player actions during the domain phase? (Did anything crop up during this session that players may want to be reminded of?)
What tools would help the rough parts of this session work better? (Were the players confused at any point? Was I unable to adjudicate a situation gracefully? Could it be smoothed out with a new procedure, mechanic, or table?)
Over the course of the two weeks between each session I work my way through the list, restocking and revising what is needed.
As of today, those are the procedures I use for running On a Red World Alone. Though, the next session is coming up very shortly now, so by the time you read this it’s very likely something will have changed somewhere.
When your character drops to 0 hit points1 in On A Red World Alone, two things happen:
You must roll on the permanent injury table.
I remind you that the next hit will kill you dead.
That’s it. The character’s ability to take actions is not inhibited in any way beyond their specific injury, and their own desire to avoid character death. This always surprises and slightly confuses new players, who expect having no hit points to restrict their options more severely. It even surprises and confuses old players who haven’t been at 0 hit points in awhile. (Which, as an inattentive player myself, I totally understand.)
I’ve been running games this way for many years now, because it creates an interesting choice: What risks are you willing to take when you’re one knuckle sandwich away from certain death? To me that choice is made so much less interesting if you’re also inhibited by moving at half speed, or rolling with disadvantage, or especially if the only action you’re allowed to take is “roll to stop bleeding.”
If the injured character escapes immediate danger, they are faced with another interesting choice: do they move to the back rank of the party and continue on their quest, or do they find somewhere to hunker down and heal? Healing requires 8 hours of rest2, in which time whatever task they’re pursuing will definitely become more challenging in some way. Doors will be locked, traps will be laid, their enemies will be reinforced, or rival bands of plunderers will arrive to compete for loot.
1 I don’t fuck with negative hit points. If you’ve got 3hp, taking 3 damage and taking 30 damage have identical results. I have toyed with the idea of a catastrophic injury rule where damage that would reduce you to -10 is instantly lethal, but at present I’m not doing that.
2 You can restore 1hp by finding a corner to hide in for 8 hours. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to rest somewhere with a bed, food, and leisure activities, you may roll your hit die to determine how many hp you recover.
Roll on the Permanent Injury Table
My permanent injury table is more bark than bite, since only half its results are permanent.
Gain a cool scar. Roll a new Boon. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with +1 to a random Ability Score.)
In shock. Automatically fail saving throws for the rest of the session.
The most precious item the character has with them is destroyed.
Roll a die type equal to half your HD (d6 HD -> roll d3). Reduce your maximum HP by the result.
A randomly determined skill is reduced by 1 rank. (In games other than ORWA, I replace this with -1 to a random Ability Score.)
Severe bodily trauma. Your (1-2: arm, 3-4: leg, 5: eye, 6: lung, 7: kidney, 8: face) is destroyed.
I believe these entries are fairly clear, though the last one may require a bit of additional explanation.
Losing an arm prevents a character from holding two things, losing a leg prevents them from standing or moving normally. In both cases I’d roll a d% to see how much of the limb was destroyed. Losing an eye penalizes their ability to aim. Losing a lung penalizes endurance. Losing a kidney is my catch-all for digestive organs and makes them vulnerable to poisons. Lungs and kidneys are both particularly bad if you happen to lose them twice, since you can’t be alive anymore. Having one’s face destroyed penalizes social rolls.
You could get a lot more granular with different bits of the body, and the disabilities that would result from their destruction. For many years I used a huge table with over 200 grisly entries, and enjoyed it very much. I only switched to this because a smaller table is easier to keep at hand and thus faster to use. And until recently I included the possibility for characters to lose their ability to talk, smell, or hear, but I personally find those conditions challenging to enforce at the table, and so have opted to remove them.
In all cases, the nature of the injury can be tailored to whatever caused it. A swinging sword, a falling rock, a venomous bite, and a blast of fire can all destroy a person’s arm, but the particulars will differ.
Death
A character at 0 who takes another point of damage is dead. Depending on the method of death I may allow them some brave last words, or a spiteful final riposte, but then it’s time to roll a new character. Unless…?
On a Red World Alone is set in what I call a Saturday Morning SciFi milieu. Characters returning from the dead in some horrible altered form is a genre staple that I cannot deny to my players. So long as a dead character’s body isn’t completely obliterated, and their friends are able to recover it, then the player may opt to revive their character as either a Cyborg, an Undead, or a Mutant.
Cyborg resurrection has the fewest strings attached if you happen to be absurdly wealthy. For the low-low price of 9000cc + 1000cc/level, the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will replace your most mangled body parts with chrome. If you don’t happen to be absurdly wealthy, worry not! The billing department has already filed the paperwork to garnish half your XP gain until the debt is paid.
Undead resurrection is a bit of a melodramatic term. Sure, your soul was forced back into its fleshy husk by the power of eldritch sorcery which makes you repellent in the eyes of God. But your heart pumps blood, your lungs pull in air, and you don’t smell any worse than you used to. To all appearances you look as good as if you’d never died at all, but necromancers must be paid—and they place little value on plastic. Choosing Undead resurrection places the resurrected under a Geas they must complete. The nature of the Geas will depend on the goals of the magician who performed the resurrection. A wizard’s goals are rarely wholesome.
Mutant resurrection is a gamble. Somewhat less than the finest scientific minds on apocalyptic mars will blast your corpse with strange radiation, pump it full of neon colored goop, and allow stray animals to bite it. On the upside: it does bring you back to life on the cheap. On the downside: you’ve developed a disadvantageous mutation. The process by which I manage this in my own game involves a d1000 table and a series of mental filters, neither of which can reasonably be shared here. Instead, here’s a table of d12 examples:
Allergic to Silver. Can’t touch it, and takes extra damage from it.
A gross little face is growing from where the wound was. It says rude things to people.
Skin glows very slightly. Not enough to see by, but enough to make it impossible to hide in darkness.
Mutant grows tight strands between fingers, hindering their manual dexterity. Reduce a finger-dependent skill by 1 rank.
Nose becomes large and hypersensitive. Must make a saving throw to avoid fleeing from strong smells.
Legs shrink. Normal movement rate is reduced by 25%.
If this mutant touches a wounded person, they absorb that person’s damage. They cannot control this ability, and cloth clothing isn’t enough to prevent touching.
The mutant’s body produces a stone which, if destroyed, instantly kills the mutant. The inverse is not true: the stone being secure does not prevent the mutant from any harm.
The mutant has absolutely no sense of direction. They cannot “go back the way they came” if they’re alone, and will fail any navigation checks.
The mutant is profoundly unpleasant to talk to. Try as they might, they’re always going to say stuff that’s boring, mean, or offensive. -1 on social checks.
Skin flakes off constantly, leaving an easy-to-follow trail wherever they go.
Weak little baby lungs prevent this mutant from holding their breath at all, for any reason.
In conclusion
A stranger once told me that they’d heard of my games through one of my players, and reported that this player’s favorite thing about playing with me is that death feels like an ever-present risk. This surprised me. It is lovely to know my players speak well of me, but I don’t think of my games as being particularly deadly. Certainly I don’t intervene to prevent death from happening if that’s how the player’s choices and the luck of the dice land, but in practice PC death doesn’t happen often. Most of this post has been about the ways players can survive when they ought to have died!
I think the operative word in this second-hand performance review is “feels.” Death feels like an ever-present risk in my games, because when players get close to it the game changes. They’re faced with decisions that have clear life-or-death stakes, and if they manage to survive the experience still leaves its mark on them.
This post is an update to my 2017 essay “Structuring Encounter Tables.” It’s intended to replace that earlier version, and thus includes a bit of self-plagiarism.
In order for an environment to feel dangerously alive it must intrude on the player’s desired activities. For any activity in my game, there are increments of fictional time which require the players to roll the Event Die. Each face of the Event Die corresponds to something, but the most complex and important result is an Encounter, which then calls for a roll on my Encounter Table.
All my encounter tables are 2d6 tables1. The bell curve allows me to vary the likelihood of different encounters. The ones that are most likely can be a little mundane, so that even as they intrude on the player’s desires they also serve to establish what is normal in this place. The less frequent encounters can be the zanier stuff that’s fun to write, but would make the game feel disjointed if they were omnipresent.
1 The methods I describe here could easily be adapted for use a 2d4 or a 2d8. I have occasionally used 2d4 myself when I was running smaller campaigns with fewer expected sessions. In general, though, I find that 2d4 doesn’t give me enough room for all the variety I like to pack into a table. Conversely, 2d8 tables are too big. They take too much effort to write, and the odds of uncommon results occurring are too diminishingly remote for my preference.
2 is always a dragon
Because all of our games could use more dragons in them. The game is called “Dungeons & Dragons,” yet in my experience, the appearances of dragons end up being exceedingly rare when contrasted with how often dungeons show up. They don’t need to be these hulking colossal beasts capable of stepping on PCs as though they were ants. They don’t need to be impossible to defeat, so long as they’re scary. A lizard the size of a car with 8 more hit dice than that party’s average, multiple attacks each around, and a big breath weapon is more than enough.
When my players encounter a dragon there’s a 1-in-3 chance that it’s hungry and wants to gobble them up. In this mood a dragon can’t be reasoned with, you’ve got to fight or flee. The other 2/3rds of the time the dragon will simply demand tribute from anyone who crosses its path. Anyone who refuses to pay tribute is gobbled up on principal as a warning to people who think they’re allowed to say ‘no’ to a dragon. Each of my dragons has a preferred form of tribute (perhaps unique books or fancy bottles of booze) but will also accept money of a certain amount per person.
12 is always a wizard
Because all of our games could use more wizards in them. Because wizards are the coolest, fuck you wizard haters. A wizard doesn’t need a complete spell list and inventory of magic items. All they need is the ability to do something really weird and scary, and an escape plan. Wizards know they’ve got a d4 hit die, so they’ve always got an escape plan.
Wizards, being a few steps closer to humanity than dragons, are slightly less likely to want to eat people. Like all my encounters, they’ll be pursuing some specific activity when the party meets them—though because they’re wizards that activity may be completely inscrutable. Capable-looking passers by may find themselves press-ganged into doing something strange, and a lucky party may earn a boon. Though, it’s just as likely that what a wizard wants is something the party would never willingly give up. “The foot of a traveler” is a desirable component for certain spells.
My private rule is that it’s not possible for the party to become friends with a wizard, because wizards do not have friends. Wizards divide people into three categories: people they hate, people who are useful, and people who are beneath their notice. That third group is definitely the safest one to be in.
Wizards and Dragons are each factions of one. They’re individuals with enough personal power that they don’t have to worry about rules or territories. They usually have a few minions, but they control them at their whims rather than by any formalized structure. When encountering either of these creatures the party should be in great personal danger, but clever play could also bring them great advantage. If a wizard or dragon is slain, there are consequences. Allegiances shift, power vacuums appear and are filled, and valuable treasure hoards are left without their most powerful guardians.
7 is usually Recurring Characters.
I maintain a separate list of these, populated with NPCs the party has had some fun dealings with but who would not otherwise have any reason to recur. I rotate people off that list whenever this result causes them to appear, then rotate them back on if the list ever gets too small. In most other circumstances I prefer the purer randomness of a creature that can appear over and over again while some other creatures never do. For recurring characters though, who are mostly friendly to the party, that has often felt tedious to me. It’s fun bumping into an old friend in the grocery store. It’s awkward when you keep bumping into them in every aisle.
The Major Half of the table
8, 9, 10, and 11 are for universal threats. Stuff that could appear anywhere and any time without being out of place. The further they get from 7, the more wild they can be. So while 8 might be a rabid dog or a hungry bandit, 11 is going to be something like a void vampire or a spell-starved lich.
The Minor Half of the table
6, 5, 4, and 3 are for threats tied to specific locations. In On a Red World Alone that usually refers to the factional territories the party must travel through in order to get anywhere in the Dome, but it might also mean levels of a dungeon, regional biomes, depth beneath the surface of the sea, etc. Whatever boundaries are important for the players to understand in your setting, you can help emphasize them with this. On one side of a boundary the players fight goblins, on the other they fight flying devil sharks with tornado breath weapons.
Thus my encounter table ends up looking like this:
Roll a Dragon
[Territory]
[Territory]
[Territory]
[Territory]
Roll a Recurring Character
Six giant slugs demanding taxes in the name of the slug king. Who the hell is the slug king?
Starving Dire Bear, recently escaped from an abandoned moleman zoo deep underground.
21 Gnomes (the ideal number). A numerological cult. They’re insulted by the number of buckles on the party’s clothes.
A talking book that is horny to be read from. It makes things weird right away. (The text is about the history of obelisks).
Roll a Wizard
Kobold Territory
The party spots a pit trap. They’re supposed to spot it. There are 7 kobolds waiting to ambush them as they edge around it.
17 goblins in full armor, here to raid their kobold foes, and willing to raid anyone else they meet.
A kobold merchant traveling to the lands of the slug king to trade. Has a minotaur bodyguard, and doesn’t trust outsiders.
4 young Kobold bravos, all drunk, looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness.
Boneboy Territory
A great big rolling skull that can shoot fire out its eyes. Trying to win a marathon race. Would be furious if anyone delayed them even a moment.
A giant serpent. Unseen are 3 boneboy hunters stalking the serpent, who may ambush the party if their encounter with the serpent presents a useful advantage.
A whole company of boneboys (24!) out on marching maneuvers. They’re raw recruits. This is their first day. All but their commander will panic at first sight of the enemy.
2 boneboy warriors sitting in a small camp, polishing one another’s bones. They will be angry and embarrassed to be discovered.
By breaking the table down this way, generating 11 options becomes a much more manageable task. And adding a new location only requires generating 4 new options, rather than a whole new table. So the only task left is to actually fill the table, and the question becomes: what makes a good encounter table entry? First I ought to specify that for my purposes, an encounter is (almost) always an agent of some sort. An NPC, animal, or monster. I’ve got other tools for managing random locations or environmental hazards. Encounters are things that have their own desires and the ability to pursue them.
The first step is just to come up with something that feels cool to me. It’s easier to turn a weak encounter into a strong encounter than it is to conjure a strong encounter fully formed in my imagination. I pull ideas from anywhere. If I’m on the Minor Half of the table I try to stick to something that represents the factions and situations of the region, but otherwise I let my imagination roam widely and trust that I’ll figure out how to make it fit during play. Sometimes I’m fired by the sort of creative energy that drives me to invent a unique monster, other times I just flip through one of the monster manuals I’ve got on my shelves and pick out the first thing that looks fun. Once I’ve got everything down in a way that interests me, then I can go back over the table to figure out if the entries meet the criteria of being a good encounter. There are two wrinkles that each encounter needs in order for me to be satisfied that I’ll be able to run it quickly at the table.
Wrinkle 1
All of my Encounters are doing something specific. Even if they’re a group of 2d6 generic mooks, they need to be up to something when the party encounter them. For this I wrote a “What is the Encounter Doing” table. My original intent was to roll during play, in conjunction with rolling the encounter. In practice that slowed down play too much, so I’ve taken to using it during session prep, and its been a delight having those details at my fingertips when I run. Roll a d30 for intelligent creatures, and a d12 for animal creatures.
Lost
Hurt
Trapped
Sleeping
Eating
Sick
Tracking Prey
Lying in Ambush
Mating Behavior
Starving
Returning Home
Fleeing
Plotting
Holding Captives
Scavenging
Building a Camp
Demolishing
Doing drugs or drinking
Artistic pursuits
Spying
Committing a crime
Searching
Religious ritual
Setting, putting out, or fleeing a fire
Weeping
Excreting2
Bathing
Socializing
Gloating
Something that isn’t on this table.3
2 “Why is this in the intelligent creatures only part of the table?” I hear you ask. Because excreting NPCs are only interesting if it means they can experience shame. 3 For a table that is meant to be re-used over and over again, it’s nice to have something that forces me to reexamine it from time to time.
Wrinkle 2
At this point an encounter often doesn’t need further tweaking. However, I’ve noticed a bad tendency in myself towards encounters that don’t demand the party’s attention. I construct something that I’d be interested in engaging with for its own sake, but when I describe it to my players they just say “Alright, we keep going.” And that’s…fine. Ignoring an encounter ought to be possible sometimes, but it shouldn’t be quite so simple. Encounters ought to intrude on the players attentions more than that. Ignoring them is possible, but doing so ought to be an interesting choice with interesting consequences.
So in my final pass over an encounter I ensure that the majority of them will make some undesirable demand on the player’s attention. This can mean defending themselves from violence, or slander; figuring out how to soothe an aggrieved person, how to cope with a stolen item, or even just deciding whether or not they want to stand by while those things are happening to a sympathetic victim right in front of them.
One exception to this guideline are the Recurring Characters, because their purpose is different. Most encounters are meant to give the party little problems to solve. Recurring characters are meant to give the world a sense of history and interconnectivity. When you meet someone interesting, you might bump into them again. Usually these are friendly characters, since antagonistic character recur in other ways that will present themselves more forcefully. (i.e. plotting elaborate revenges against the party). That being said, recurring characters still ought to invite the party’s attention in some other way. Maybe they need money, or they have a quest to offer, or they’re running a shop and have something to sell. They may even have a gift for the party.
Restocking
Restocking is an essential and constant process when each entry is as specific as I’ve described. I don’t want to understate how burdensome that can be: it does mean I spend time between every single session going back to these tables and adding to them. I’ve managed to make that practice into a routine which I have not yet fallen behind on. I genuinely find it to be the easiest form of inter-session prep I’ve ever committed myself to, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring somewhat more generic and reusable encounters in order to save themselves that constant effort.
Two things make Restocking easier. The first is that, on occasions when I have more ideas than I need, I make sure to record those ideas under the encounter table, where the extra entry will be ready to sub-in when an old one gets sliced out. Second, and much more important, is that restocking rarely means coming up with a new idea from scratch. If the party encounters “4 young kobold bravos, all drunk, looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness,” then all I need to do to freshen it up is create a variation on that basic theme. This time it’ll be 8 kobolds of various ages. I roll on the table above and discover they’re building a camp. So I mash those ideas together and restock the entry with “7 kobold bravos erecting tents, while an elderly kobold sits on a nearby rock and criticizes their work ethic. None have their weapons immediately to hand.”
The way I run the game, the encounter die is the primary driver of play. It’s how I introduce adventure hooks to the players. It’s how I communicate the details of the world, big and small. It’s how I give weight to the passage of time, which in turn enables me to run a game where the players really can go anywhere and do anything, because rolling encounters gives me a chance to gather my notes and prepare details. It’s a multifaceted tool, and I happily put this much effort and thought into my Encounter Tables because the dividends they pay as play aids makes it worth the effort.
Organizing campaign notes is frustrating. My preference would be to keep all my hobby material in an analog format, but it’s not practical. A campaign is a constantly evolving mesh of interconnected ideas. A referee can never know which parts of their notes will need to be removed, or expanded wildly beyond their original scope. I’ve tried a bunch of methods: binders, notebooks, recipe boxes full of index cards, stacks of paper with bespoke organizational symbols in the upper corner. In the end, all of them required too much paper shuffling in order to find anything. Digital tools are too useful not to take advantage of here.
But my experience with digital tools has been fraught. In part that’s due to my own general Ludditism: I don’t own a smartphone, and I refuse to even consider relying on web based tools. “Sorry guys, we can’t play today, the website is down.” is an absolutely unacceptable possibility for me. Then there’s all the effort that will be involved to extract my game’s data when the web tool inevitably goes belly up, or gets bought out by some VC firm who makes it unusable. I have a strong preference for software that can be run locally, with a minimum of bloat.
I’ll say it again: organizing campaign notes is frustrating. But I did recently find an option that I’m reasonably happy with, and would like to share.
(Sorry I couldn’t unfold any of the interesting text. My players might be spying on this blog even as we speak >.>)
Libre Office is an open source suite of office software. It replaced the old OpenOffice project, and is currently the primary Free Software alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s a nice piece of software that I recommend in general, but is specifically useful for this hidden feature demonstrated in the video. The ability to to treat header text as a folder for all the body text written beneath, which can then be revealed or hidden with a click of the mouse.
To enable this feature you’ll need a reasonably recent version of LibreOffice. Navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced. On that tab, under “Optional Features,” check the box next to “Enable experimental features.” This will require restarting the application. Now you can navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOfficeWriter ▸ View, and check the box next to “Show outline-folding buttons.” Optionally, I also recommend navigating to View ▸ Web for the best effect. Page breaks are an unnecessary complication when your text is going to be expanding and contracting.
Once that’s done you’re good to go. To set text as a foldable heading, use the dropdown menu in the upper left to make it a heading. A little button should appear beside the text (you may need to hover to see it). If you click this, all the text beneath the heading (down to the next heading) will disappear. Clicking it again will cause the text to reappear. Fill the spaces beneath headings with all the tables, keys, and background information you like! I should point out that I’ve had the best luck using “Default Paragraph Text” here. For whatever reason, selecting “Body Text” has sometimes caused the folding function to stop working properly. I’m not sure why, except that this is an experimental feature and not yet fully developed.
There’s a lot I love about this method. It keeps my notes tidy, no matter how voluminous they get. It’s easy to use at the table since all the headings fit on about two digital pages. The fact that it’s built into a word processor means there’s a minimum of barrier between USING the tool (folding and unfolding it) and MAKING the tool (adding new text, removing old text.) No need to interrupt my writing process to reference special syntax any time I want to add a new header.
No solution is perfect, of course. The way you need to carefully select the way your body text is tagged is irritatingly fiddly. The feature also doesn’t seem to be well optimized. Scrolling through a large document causes the application to chug, and there’s often quite a bit of lag when folding and unfolding text. (Both issues visible in the video above). Some of that’s just down to word processors being kinda bloated pieces of software, which is why I usually write in text editors. None the less, I haven’t found any quicker or easier alternatives yet.
I should note that Microsoft Office does have a similar tool, which presumably works just as well (or better) than LibreOffice’s unfinished feature. My friend Chris H. also swears by a piece of software called Scrivener. From the looks of it, I think Scrivener would be an ideal solution to my campaign note organization needs. I’d happily pay their $50 fee to use the software. Sadly they have no linux compatible version, so I must do without. Thus I can only pass on a second-hand recommendation from Chris H.
BTW, while I’ve got you here: my friend Ava is a SuperCoolLady™ and needs some help funding her transition. If you’ve got a few dollars to spare, that’d be a very SuperCoolLady™ thing for you to spend them on.
Update January 10, 2023: This post has won the Gold Bloggie for best Advice Post! Holy crap I am floored. Thank you everyone who voted for me, or who voted for one of the other posts, or who wrote one of the other posts, and thank you to Prismatic Wasteland for running this event. Being recognized feels nice 😀
I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years, and in that time I’ve cycled through various approaches for how I get ready for a session. Like most folk, I started out with unrealistic ideas about how much and how quickly I could produce good material. Because of this, my early campaigns were basically burnout generators. They quickly morphed into Zombie Campaigns: I continued running them out of a desire to spend time with my friends and to be a good referee, but I’d lost any creative energy for improving them. A lot of promising campaigns wound up ending before they should have because of that. Over many years and many campaigns I’ve developed better strategies for handling prep. The most important of these is to focus on making flexible tools, rather than specific adventure scenarios.
A few weeks ago I began a new ORWA campaign, so let’s take the first session of that as an example. Because it was the first session, and most of the players had no previous experiences in the world to drive their activity, I needed to prepare some specific adventure scenario to get the ball rolling. I put together a little 12 room dungeon which was being contested by two factions, each of which controlled one of the dungeon’s entrances. So my players go out to this location, get invested with one of the factions, and decide the best way to help their new pals out was to do some rabble rousing among the opposing faction’s neighbors. Then there was an impromptu street fair organized around a challenge fight, which the party skillfully manipulated into a riot when their opponents failed to honor the terms of the fight, culminating in the party using the cover of the mob to assault their enemy’s fortified position.
It was a good little adventure, and a great tone-setter for the campaign! It had everything I like to see: I was able to show off the Saturday Morning SciFi weirdness of my setting; the players did some creative problem solving; they punched above their weight class by leveraging a precarious social situation and deploying their skills and spells precisely when and where they would have the most impact. And never once did they set foot in my dungeon, or deal with any of the specific challenges I had prepared.
I’m glad I had that dungeon prepared. If they’d gone into it, I’d have needed those notes. But I’m also glad I didn’t put too much work into it. The whole scenario—setup, map, and key—was scribbled across 3 pages of my notebook. It was a sloppy little thing I threw together during loading screens in video games and boring scenes in movies. If I’d put much more effort into it I might have been annoyed that I never got to use it.
My more serious preparation time was spent making reusable tools to help me quickly generate gameplay no matter what the players decide to do. In the same session I described above, I used the setting map to quickly identify how long the party would need to travel and what sights they’d see along the way. I used encounter tables to give that travel time weight.1 The encounters also presented the players with a series of smaller side-challenges to navigate, many of which provide hooks or foreshadowing for larger campaign events still to come.2 When the party decided to start rabble rousing among the enemy faction’s neighbors I was able to use my NPC generator to quickly give those neighbors some personality and wants of their own. I was also able to reference the territory this was taking place in, and the social norms of that territory informed what challenges the party would face carrying out their plan.3 When the party organized a street fair I could have had a unique street vendor show up with my popup shop generator,4 but at that point we were running short on time so I decided not to.
1I detailed my general approach for structuring encounter tables in 2017, though I ought to post about its updated form at some point. (Update July 22, 2022) I have now posted about its updated form! 2 One of those challenges, a minor trap the party fell into, resulted in a friendship with the creatures operating the trap. The party has become highly engaged with that friendship, and those creatures have appeared in every session since. 3 In this case, the local population was already prejudiced against the group the PCs wanted to turn them against, so it was easier than normal. 4 Similar to the Goblin Bazaar I described a couple years back.
All this stuff is what I spent time carefully crafting before the game, and almost all of it is reusable. The specific table entries will change a bit: some have been consumed and new entries need to be written. Others are temporarily exhausted and I moved them off the table for a bit. Still others remain on the table with a note that the next time they occur will be the party’s second encounter, with consequent developments. (“Ah, we meet again!” says the creepy sewer vampire.) But now that the tables have been written this restocking is fairly quick and easy to get done. For some tables I’ve even got pre-written replacements ready to go from days when I had too many ideas to fit on a given table.
Other tools I prepared that didn’t come up in that specific session include:
A schedule of goals for each of the game’s major factions, so that each time they accomplish something I immediately know what they’re working on next.
A table for determining what a random encounter is doing at the moment they’re encountered. I usually roll this outside the session while stocking the encounter tables.
Generalized tables for the results of doing something that publicly affects the party’s reputation, good or bad.
Specific consequences, good and bad, for some of the party’s more notable actions. I roll one of these at the start of each session. (This is a bastardized adaptation of Arnold’s Potential Drama idea).
A table of major events that will occur in the world, irrespective of the player’s actions. Stuff like natural disasters, or the deaths of public figures. (A distant evolution of Brendan’s Haven Complications table).
A series of tables and a little stack of blank maps to help me quickly throw together a small adventure site if the party finds one that I haven’t specifically prepared.
And of course, it bears mentioning that even my unused dungeon can now be repurposed as fuel for my tools. The parts the players learned about will need to be discarded: the nexus of varied mutagenic energies, and the Sherman tank in the basement that was being disassembled and smuggled out in pieces. The individual rooms however—none of which the players explored—could be shuffled among encounter tables, or into my adventure site generator.
The great thing about tools is that in addition to saving the referee’s time and energy, they’re able to react to the player’s actions in a way that specifically prepared scenarios just can’t. If the players are walking down the street towards a dungeon, then become randomly fascinated by a bit of graffiti and wander into an alley on a wild goose chase, then if all you’ve got prepared is that one dungeon you’re stuck. But if you’ve got a table of interesting locations that are designed to fit anywhere in your setting, you can keep the game rolling as if you’d planned for this all along. And when the players are able to find interesting adventure no matter where they go your campaign world will feel much more alive.
The reactive potential of tools is also why my most important prep occurs immediately after running a session. While I’m writing out my recap of events (something I’m indulgently excessive about), I have a set of questions to ask myself:
Did the players encounter any interesting NPCs that it would be fun to add to my Recurring Characters table?
Did the party wrong anyone who might hold a grudge against them? What form might revenge take? (Put this on the consequences table).
Does anyone feel that they owe the party a favor? What might they do to settle the debt? (Put this on the consequences table).
Review all the table entries used, and restock anything that needs it.
What parts of the session were rough, and what tools or techniques would help them work better in future?
That last one is a biggie. For example, as the sessions have gone on, this party has taken out a lot of loans. That’s not something other groups I’ve played with have done. The first couple times it happened I set an arbitrary limit for how big a loan could be, and noted down the amounts without any real idea of how it would be collected. Now I’ve worked out a formalized little procedure for how loans are guaranteed and how debt repayment is enforced.
As of posting this, the renewed ORWA campaign has had 4 sessions. I made sure I had another specific adventure prepped before we started session 2, but once again I’m glad it’s a thing I scribbled casually into my notebook; because 3 sessions later the players still haven’t stopped moving long enough to need me to prompt them towards an adventure. My tools and their own desires have entered a feedback loop that hasn’t left room for me to say “Well, there’s X thing going on over here…”
I’ve also got heaps more creative energy left in me than I used to after the first few sessions of a new campaign.
In the coming weeks 5 Years Left will be ending. Its been a fun and creatively rejuvenating game, but after nearly two years I’m ready to shift focus. I want to delve back into On a Red World Alone. Play a game with more substantial factions, where players have more opportunity to make world-altering plans. Before I can get things started back on mars, though, I’ve got to develop some tools for myself. Part of the reason I took a break from this game was my fatigue with trying to support a style of play I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how to referee a satisfying domain game. Worse, I didn’t even know what it was I needed to learn, and never had the time or energy to figure it out. Now I do.
When ORWA returns, the players will be governing a major faction. Major factions can’t be challenged with pit traps or goblins. They need to be challenged by other factions. Groups with their own idea of how the dome ought to be governed, and the power to manifest that government. These other factions can’t be finite challenges the way a typical dungeon or dragon is. If a faction can be cleared in 2-4 sessions of play, then the game won’t last long. Additionally, I’d really like to introduce some new factions to the game, without abandoning the ones my older players will have gotten to know over ORWA’s previous half-decade-long run. But because this game takes place within the confined space of a city-sized bio-dome on mars, there’s not a lot of room for new factions to exist in.
These are problems that will require a variety of solutions. Some of the less interesting old factions have merged together. Other factions that the old party effectively defeated no longer hold any territory at all, and if they still exist have reorganized into religious institutions, mercenary gangs, merchant corporations, etc. Some factions are able to exist outside the dome, underground, or up in space. The least typical sort of faction, and the one I’d like to work through here, is a secret society. It solves two of my issues right off the bat: secret societies don’t openly hold territory, and so I don’t need any extra space to fit them in. They also defy being a finite challenge, since players can struggle against them without knowing who’s in charge. They don’t have anyone to negotiate with or assassinate.
On a Red World Alone has a long tradition of secret society factions. For the majority of the original campaign the players were agents of a mysterious organization known as “The Internet.” One of the culminating events of that campaign was the players destroying that organization, scattering its resources to the wind, and even hunting down the most powerful remnants of its leadership. They leveraged the tools and secrets they stole from it to build their own faction in the shadows, sharing technology and building alliances until they were powerful enough that I didn’t know how to run the game anymore. It seems fitting that secret societies remain a part of the world. Perhaps, just to give my players an eerie sense of déjà vu, some of their own agents are capable-yet-unorthodox upstarts with secret plans to overthrow their masters.
Let’s imagine a theoretical faction that definitely won’t exist in ORWA: the Cult of the Sleeping God. Their goal is to wake their lazy god up. Every faction needs a goal beyond simply seeking more power. Power-seeking is in the nature of big factions, but each has a certain form or flavor of power they value. This is a religious faction, so they’re seeking power in the form of making their god more powerful.
To awaken their god, the cult needs 3 things: cosmic smelling salts (requiring many rare, expensive, difficult-to-acquire ingredients); access to the dimension in which their god sleeps (they’ll need to learn the secret of how to get there); and to kill the traitor who put their god to sleep in the first place (one of the party’s allies!). Whenever it comes time for this faction to act, they’ll do something in pursuit of one of these things.
For any faction to work as an interesting part of the game the players must, at minimum, know the faction exists. So the Cult of the Sleeping God will have a sigil they paint or carve whenever they take action. Something to bless their efforts, and celebrate their victories. It’s not a very good way to keep a secret, but if the faction were too good at keeping secrets then I’d be the only one who knew about them. I’ve done stuff like that before, and every time it’s just me on my own doing extra work the players never see, and which doesn’t improve the play of the game.
By their very nature, secret societies should show up in places where a normal faction would not. For example, while any faction might place spies to gain information, a secret society could build an entire network within the party’s own faction. So as the party is recruiting specialists—diplomats, scientists, architects, etc.—there’s some chance they may be plants working for the Cult of the Sleeping God. Leeching the player’s resources, building back-doors into everything they do. As another example, players will make rolls occasionally to check the health of their faction. Are the needs of their citizens being met, are their supply lines secure, is there civil unrest? If something is going wrong there’s no reason the Cult of the Sleeping God couldn’t occasionally and obviously be behind it.
I haven’t fully settled on the form domain play will take yet, but part of the procedure of the “Domain Turn” is going to be a phase when a number of other factions get to make ‘moves.’ I won’t have every faction move during every session, since moves are big things that presumably took careful planning. Also it would be tedious. I’d rather players have 2-3 moves to react to during a session. The factions that move are also going to be somewhat randomized. So another way the Cult of the Sleeping God could show up where it’s not supposed to be would be to have them on the the faction table twice. One entry would be the cult acting somewhat obviously on its own behalf. Enough that the player’s information networks can confidently inform them that the cult was responsible. The other entry would call for a re-roll on the faction table, and whatever faction the dice landed on will make a move that has been influenced by members of the Cult that have infiltrated its hierarchy.
This is all very rough. Restarting ORWA is a large project, and like most large projects there’s no clear place to start. Every piece is contingent on some other piece that doesn’t yet exist. The only way to get it done is to start putting things in place, building off them, then coming back around and revising that first stuff once I’ve got a better idea of how the rest of the structure fits together. I don’t yet know exactly what the domain turn looks like, or what elements make up the player’s “domain character sheet,” but the idea of introducing a secret society appealed to me. And now I’ve got an idea about how a secret society might want to attack the party, which has forced me to think about the sorts of resources the party might have, which gives me something to tinker on next, and so on until the game is ready.
I got together with Arnold K. (of Goblin Punch) to play some D&D recently. I ran him through an accelerated version of CM8 – The Endless Stair, an Ed Greenwood module from 1987. Once we’d played through the whole thing we talked about it for about an hour. By the time we were done the adventure was pretty thoroughly juiced, I’d say.
We also recorded ourselves while doing these things. If that sounds like it would amuse you, you’ll find the videos below. The first is our play session, and the second is our discussion.
